Lula

Lula Commerce, founded in 2021 by Adit Gupta and Tom Falzani, provides a digital commerce platform for retailers and quick-service restaurants (QSRs). The company's creation was spurred by Gupta's personal experience during the pandemic, when he encountered difficulties helping his parents' convenience store transition to online sales. This led him, a computer science graduate student at Drexel University at the time, and Falzani to develop a solution for small businesses facing similar challenges.

The company operates in the e-commerce sector, targeting a range of clients from mom-and-pop stores to enterprise-level retail chains like Jacksons Food Stores and Par Mar Stores. Lula Commerce's business model is centered on providing an all-in-one platform that enables retailers to manage online ordering and delivery services across various third-party marketplaces, such as DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub. Revenue is generated through subscription fees, with retailers paying for access to the platform's suite of tools and managed services.

The core of Lula's offering is the Lula Hub, a centralized system that integrates inventory management, order processing, and financial reporting. This allows businesses without dedicated developer teams to establish an online presence. The platform has expanded to include Lula Commerce, which combines AI with industry knowledge to handle tasks typically managed by a retailer's internal marketing, operations, and data science teams. Key features include analytics for actionable insights, an AI voice agent for taking phone orders, and the upcoming Lula Direct, an enterprise-grade first-party ordering engine. The company's services aim to reduce the operational burden for retailers, with claims that their managed services can offset the work of several full-time employees.

Since its inception, Lula Commerce has achieved significant milestones, including raising $7 million in funding and expanding its services to thousands of locations across 44 states. After starting with a small pre-seed round, the company secured a $6.5 million venture capital round in 2022, which validated the market need for its platform. The company was also part of the SOSV Food-X accelerator program in New York, which helped secure its initial funding.

Keywords: digital commerce solutions, retail e-commerce platform, QSR online ordering, convenience store delivery, multi-channel retail, third-party delivery integration, inventory management software, managed e-commerce services, AI retail solutions, online order management, Adit Gupta, Tom Falzani, Philadelphia startup, retail technology, Lula Hub, e-commerce automation, enterprise retail solutions, food delivery service integration, digital transformation for retail, small business e-commerce